Tientos - Music from the Time of Louis XIV (2002)

This is a generous selection of music from the chambers of the French mid Baroque‚ with pieces by two of its greatest masters – Marais and Sainte Colombe – alongside others by the lesser but still worthy Hotteterre and Montéclair‚ plus practically the only piece by Jacques Morel that ever gets played. The starting¬point seems to be the particular line up of Tientos‚ a Vienna based group distinguished by the fact that one of its number can double on recorder and viola da gamba. Thus the pieces included are either for recorder and continuo (Hotteterre and Montéclair)‚ two gambas with and without continuo (Marais and Sainte Colombe respectively)‚ or recorder‚ gamba and continuo (Morel).
The fact that this ‘recorder’ music was originally intended for flute does not seem to bother Tientos too much‚ and of course in these liberated days there is no real reason why it should. Yet although the switch of instrument brings an agility and incisiveness of attack that the Baroque flute would not manage‚ the slight but insidious rawness of Johanna Valencia’s playing (most uncomfortable of all in the opening track) does not strike me as an overall gain. It is left to the two gamba music to soothe us‚ and this it does with some success‚ above all in the beautiful and haunting creations of Sainte Colombe.
Nowhere on this release could the performers be criticised for lack of stylistic and musical awareness (they show humour‚ too‚ in the recorder overblows of Montéclair’s ‘Le Rémouleur’‚ a depiction of a knife grinder at work)‚ yet in the end a lack of overall refinement makes this a naggingly unsatisfying disc‚ its power to charm not helped by a strangely diffuse recorded sound. The programme is a unique one of course‚ yet most of its constituent parts can be heard to better effect elsewhere.